My mother, the racist
She spent her life in northern France doing exhausting, back-breaking work – and yet she turned her anger against people who had done no wrongs to her. But as much as I couldn’t stand her rants, I was forced to accept her as she was
When I reconnected with my mother after years of near total absence, years in which we barely spoke, I was struck with compassion for this old woman suffering from so much pain. I even felt a tenderness towards her. This was despite everything that had driven us apart and continued to divide us. Her obsessive racism dismayed me, but in order to avoid always being in conflict, I would only protest half-heartedly when she launched into one of her habitual diatribes (herself the daughter of an immigrant, a traveller from Andalucía) against “foreigners”, who came to “our home” instead of staying “where they came from” (“It doesn’t even feel like home here any more”, “They take everything and there’s nothing left for us”), against “Arabs”, or “Blacks”, or “Chinese”, all of whom she complained about endlessly. (The language she used was often considerably cruder than this.)
It was in part so I would no longer have to listen to this kind of talk that I had stopped seeing her and had fled both my family and this milieu. Nothing had changed after all this time: on this point, as on many others, she was the same as before. And yet, if I wished to spend time with her – and I did wish to, or at least it was something I felt I should do – I was going to have to accept her as she was. Nothing about her was going to change! And when I did dare to give expression to my annoyance, she would reply in a firm, almost aggressive tone: “I can say what I want in my own home. You can’t tell me what to do.” I had no choice but to try to understand her, to understand how and why she had become this way, and to put aside my spontaneous reactions of dismay.
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